Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu resigned on Tuesday in a procedural move after a parliamentary election but will remain in his post until a new government is formed, President Tayyip Erdogan's office said in a statement.
Davutoglu's ruling AK Party lost its majority in Sunday's vote, forcing it to either form a coalition government with an opposition party, a process that could take weeks, or try to go it alone in a minority government.
Erdogan is expected to officially ask Davutoglu to form the new government once the final results are published by electoral authorities, which may not be until next week.
On another note, four people were killed in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast on Tuesday after the shooting of an Islamic aid group leader touched off a violent clash, security sources said, two days after a historic election win for Kurds.
The cause of the killings was not immediately clear, although there have been sporadic clashes in the southeast in recent years between Islamists and supporters of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).
Security sources confirmed that Aytac Baran, a leader of the Yeni Ihya Der aid group, was shot dead as he left his office in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir. Three more people were killed in a clash that followed, the security sources said.
Yeni Ihya Der is linked to the Islamist political party Huda Par, which draws support from sympathisers of Hizbullah, the militant group active in the 1990s.
"He was martyred," a Huda Par official told Reuters, referring to Baran, while the HDP condemned the killing.
"We expect those responsible for the attack to be revealed in a way that won't leave any doubt," it said in a statement. "We hope that credence is not given to any mentality trying to turn our people against each other."
The attack came two days after the leftist HDP cleared the 10 percent threshold to enter the Turkish parliament as a party for the first time.
Last Friday, three people were killed in two blasts at a HDP rally in Diyarbakir. The party's leader, Selahattin Demirtas, said on Monday a string of bombings targeting the party during its campaign had been linked with Islamic State militants.
Many of the HDP's grassroots Kurdish supporters are sympathisers with the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought a 30-year insurgency against the state in which 40,000 people have been killed.
REUTERS